Measure For Measure: Free E-Book, “How To Sing Sol-Fa”

A song may tell a story or it may not. It can be as sophisticated as “Satin Doll” or as in-your-face as “Hot for Teacher.” Certainly all songs are different in their own way, but almost all of them are alike in one respect: They effortlessly take us deep inside a world of feeling. Words can tell us about joy or sorrow, but songs can literally make us laugh or cry, and no poem, no matter how good, is likely to make us want to get up and dance.

The secret of this miracle is no secret at all: music. If we want to be good songwriters, we must understand the musical language. “Measure for Measure” has been decoding that language for just under a year now, and our third e-book is another step in that direction.

I felt it necessary to put “How to Sing Sol-fa” in context, lest you mistake it for just another book on how to sing “Do, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol.” Well, actually, it is another book on how to sing “Do, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol,” but not just any book, hence the subtitle, “And Boost Your Musical I.Q.”

“Do, Re, Mi,” is more than the theme of a Julie Andrews song—it is a key to unlocking melodic meaning. My January/February column, “The Sound of Music,” describes the emotional implications that saturate every syllable in the sol-fa system, but without training, this is something you can only experience intellectually. If you do the exercises in “How to Sing Sol-Fa,” you will soon be singing “I Can See Clearly Now.”

Enough said. You can get your free e-book just by e-mailing info@americansongwriter.com and putting “Request How to Sing Sol-Fa” in the subject line. If you haven’t seen the other two e-books for the column—“Interval Color in Hit Songs” and “Making Rainbows”—be sure to ask for those, too. Just put the titles in the subject line.